On August 7, a researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, Robert Elwood, announced that there is strong evidence that crustaceans—lobsters, crabs, shrimp, and other sea creatures—are quite capable of feeling pain. Hitherto, researchers have considered these animals to have only “nociception,” that is, a reflex that causes them to avoid a noxious stimulus of some sort. Writing with colleague Barry Magee in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Elwood instead holds that they learn from painful experiences, exhibiting learning behaviors that are “consistent with key criteria for pain experience and are broadly similar to those from vertebrate studies.” In other words, unless we’re prepared to throw a live cow or chicken into a stock pot, then we need to rethink our approach.

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Since at least the 1960s and ’70s and the experimental work of John Lilley and other researchers, we have known that dolphins are exceptionally intelligent. In the intervening years, our understanding has deepened. Not long ago, we learned that dolphins “speak” in dialects. Now comes a report that reveals that dolphins call each other by the equivalent of a name. In a study conducted by scholars at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of bottlenose dolphins was discovered to use distinctive whistles when calling to each other. When the scientists played back recordings of those whistles with underwater speakers, the dolphins responded to calls much as humans answer to their own names. This is the first time this kind of behavior has been observed in a nonhuman species, although some studies suggest that parrots and other intelligent birds may use a similar system of individually directed calls.

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Moreover, dolphins keep what scientists call “social memories.” If an elephant never forgets—never forgets a wrong done to it, the proverb means to say—then dolphins never forget anything, it seems, including the voices of individuals alongside whom they had swum as long as 20 years earlier. Reports Jason N. Bruck of the University of Chicago in the newest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, dolphins—again, bottlenose—listened to recordings of signature whistles and responded with enthusiasm to ones made of individuals with whom they had lived while exhibiting little emotion when listening to individuals they did not know. Some of the recordings were decades old, suggesting that the dolphin may have the longest long-term memories of any animal studied so far. Bruck’s aim is greater still: he wishes, he says, to “show whether the call evokes a representational mental image of that individual.”

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We have no idea what the ancient reptile known as Bunostegos akokanensis thought about as it roamed the central desert of the supercontinent of Pangaea some 260 million years ago. It was the size of a cow, this “pareiasaurian reptile known from the Upper Permian Moradi Formation of northern Niger,” as a paper describing the discovery of its fossil remains puts it. The “knobbly reptile” was the size of a cow, and it had a bovine diet of wild grasses and plants. Apart from that, the creature was—well, let’s just say that it looked a bit like Jabba the Hutt, that mythical creature of another desert in a galaxy far, far away.

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.